Historically, remote monitoring of worker safety has been managed via phone-in and radio-in systems that require workers to report their location periodically to a person or a voice recording system via telephone or radio. In more recent times, with the introduction of location-enabled portable wireless communication devices, geographic locator systems communicate worker location to remote server systems. Prior art has relied on previously available know-how to correctly render a field worker's ongoing safety, to a limited degree. Some portable wireless safety products have used mechanical ball-bearing switches to measure the ongoing activity of the worker in order to reset an alarm timer that would otherwise communicate a ‘motionless’ alert to a remote receiver system. In practical terms, the mechanical switch measures vibration and is not always able to measure physical translation of the device through three dimensional space. Additionally, mechanical switches are not always able to measure the physical translation through three dimensional space that corresponds to a field worker's body falling from a height whereupon the worker may sustain injury or perish.
Safety devices thus suffer from various limitations, and in addition, there is the need for safety devices to communicate other possible worker safety threats not addressed by the state of the art.